Why does the lag meter lie now?

Community General Discussion
1

Is there a reason why the latency meter flat out lies these days? It can take 3 seconds to cast an instant spell and the latency meter will still say some bs like 70ms.

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2

Well the latency meter doesn’t track how long it takes you to cast a spell, have it register on the server, and then have the server talk back to you with the results.

It measures how long a small packet takes to reach the server and acknowledged as being received. This is between 32 and 56 bytes on average whereas a standard package is normally like 1500 bytes and can be as large as 65,535 bytes. It also does not take into account any processing on the server or internal networking between virtual machines on the server side.

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Yesterday was super fun trying to get the invasion/emissary done. Quest mob wouldn’t come out of his hot air balloon, everything was taking forever to register whether it was abilities or clicking stuff… Got that done and logged off to play another game. Sad.

4

I agree with the OP about that latency indicator being changed.

There are times when I am going along, have my normal 22-25ms latency, and all is well. And then suddenly, the latency climbs really high as evidenced by my actions in game that require a server response being significantly delayed by a couple of seconds, yet when I go to check the latency, it still says 22-25ms. Only after a much longer wait does the latency indicator finally update to what it really is, and it’s then hundreds of ms or even a thousand plus. (And to be fair, the increased latency seems most often to be on my household’s end with someone else sucking down a big download or something.)

I don’t know if they decreased the frequency of checking the latency or how often the display in game is updated, but it does seem to this big dumb cow that things don’t behave as they have in the past.

/moo :cow:

5

I suspect that Sorelai’s post is more informative than this will be. But to add a small piece of opinion, we shouldn’t ask the latency meter why it is telling us that everything is okay, but instead ask the game why everything is no longer okay (the latency meter is reporting the same thing it always has).

Before (from a basic user perspective), we had two basic categories of lag:
PC-Based: like graphics, cpu, or driver problems
Connection-based: any level of network issue that prevented a stable connection (and would be reflected in ping eventually)

We now have a third type being seemingly encountered by a significant number of players where connection to the server (as shown by ping) is stable, however the server fails to interact appropriately with client input.

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I’m not a programmer, all I know is that I’m seeing lag-spikes even in older, less populated areas and getting DC’d at least twice per day…usually during an M+ run or raid, or some other “worst possible time”.